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Abstract

When civil wars are resolved via negotiated settlement, peace-agreement provisions like power-sharing agreements and third-party security guarantees often are advocated for their purported benefits of ensuring a long-lasting and durable peace. Although scholars have explored the effects of peace-agreement provisions on enhancing the security of states, their influence on shaping individual security outcomes is largely unknown. The strong potential exists that these same provisions that improve a government's ability to deter future violence also increase that government's violation of its citizens' physical integrity rights as a means of coercion and governance. Also rare in the power-sharing literature is exploration of the effects of individual, disaggregated provisions.

Both models are evaluated in light of the situational and historical contexts relevant to each state's civil war experience. The universe of cases includes thirty-six civil wars in twenty-seven states where conflict terminated between 1989-2007 via negotiated settlement. This project leverages a mixed-method research design, including contingency tables and fuzzy-set Quantitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to resolve the "small number of cases, multiple variables" challenge and to account for causal complexity.

Four central claims are advanced in this dissertation: First, the common technique of evaluating peace-agreement provisions by aggregating them according to common political, military, and territorial dimensions obscures and misleads scholars; the disaggregation of peace-agreement provisions reveals how measures often act in opposition. Second, a number of commonly present provisions--including integration of rebels into the main military ranks and the granting of territorial autonomy--are consistently inhibitory to individual security after civil war ends. Third, other provisions such as robust third-party security guarantees and the granting of territorial federalism consistently lead to a reduction in the level of political repression used by states after civil war has ended. Fourth, significant human-rights improvement results from favorable causal recipes (i.e., combinations of disaggregated conditions) that together reduce both the motivation and opportunity of a government to repress.

These findings will assist decision-makers involved in negotiated settlements, as they (1) identify the appropriate blends of peace-agreement provisions for resolving different civil wars, and (2) balance the need for a post-conflict government to both assure its population and to deter future violence.